HOW would you like to receive a £300 cheque from the Government? A voucher that must be spent on a struggling High Street within three months?
If sent to every adult in Britain, these cheques would deliver a £15bn spending boost to silent cash tills, giving the economy a desperately-needed shot in the arm.
Or perhaps it could be a much larger dollop of cash, one that people drowning in credit card bills must spend on clearing their paralysing debts – with only those in the black free to spend it as they wished?
Maybe the Government should set up a National Investment Bank for key pump-priming projects, one that, unlike the touted Green Investment Bank, would be able to borrow and invest serious billions?
What about a two-year tax holiday on National Insurance contributions, by both employers and employees, for anyone under the age of 25?
All these ideas have one thing in common.
None featured in this week’s make-or-break autumn statement by the Chancellor. Nor even, probably, in the brain-storming sessions that preceded it.
Yet all of them been put forward recently by serious economic thinkers as the sort of radical ideas that must be embraced, if Britain is to dig itself out of its deepening economic hole.
Their absence is proof that, for all George Osborne’s boast to be “doing all that we can”
to stimulate that elusive economic growth, his actions remain incredibly cautious.
For example, the Chancellor has worn his high-visibility jacket on more building sites than I can remember recently, but his £5bn for new infrastructure schemes is pitifully small. The reality is that capital spending is being cut by almost one-third in this parliament and even that £5bn has been found by picking the pockets of families on tax credits, cutting spending power even further.
Mr Osborne is gambling that growth will miraculously appear from 0.5 per cent interest rates and by pumping electronic money into the economy, through quantitative easing, even though it hasn’t worked for the last year.
Labour is less timid, but not much so. Its five-point plan for jobs, a £2bn raid on bankers’ bonuses, would help, but only at the margin. Yet this week’s economic medicine was unremittingly bleak. The future is scary and if the Eurozone crisis isn’t fixed, it will be much worse.
In that terrifying context, I’m struck by the caution of our politicians, in comparison with economists who are urging them to think the unthinkable. One, Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman, condemned Osbornomics for being like “a medieval doctor bleeding his patient, observing that the patient is getting sicker, not better, and deciding that this calls for even more bleeding.”
Who is right? Well, it’s worth remembering that many of those economists predicted the financial crash even as Mr Osborne was demanding less regulation of the banks.
STOCKTON North’s Alex Cunningham turned to football to warn of rising unemployment, saying: “Middlesbrough football fans used to chant, “There’s only one job on Teesside”, in celebration of Joseph-Desire Job, who played for the club.
“That is no longer very funny, because young people might be under the impression that it is actually true, as hundreds of them chase every
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